This paper examines the response provided after the devastation provoked by the typhoon Yolanda in Tacloban City (Philippines) in 2013. It uses an autoethnography of the author’s experience as a volunteer with Read World Foundation coordinating the disaster response from Canada. The author claims that transnational aid activism is an inherent intersectional praxis, connecting the personal to the political and the global to the local. She analyses in particular how power structures are manifested in the transfer of funds and the distribution of relief services. Thus, intersectionality serves here to understand how people are impacted by a disaster, how they mobilise to provide assistance but also limits of their outreach